Ivette
Parhizkar
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Parhizkar is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She completed her Ph.D. at Yale University in the departments of American Studies and Black Studies in 2025. As a relational-comparative scholar in the interdisciplinary humanities, her research and teaching areas include aesthetics; diasporic literatures and culture; poetic thought; and anticolonial, decolonial, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory in the hemispheric Americas. Her primary research project concerns how the material logics of colonialism––particularly, its possessive drive to accumulate land and beings––underscore the practices of 20th/21st-century artists, writers and performers who “inventory” objects, people, places and events, using such strategies to make legible cataclysmic loss when justice has otherwise been foreclosed. She is also developing research in two further areas: a project on diasporic Salvadoran orientations toward blackness, indigeneity and the nation-state in creative practice and social life; and a critical-creative study that thinks with soil as a living, relational site of historical memory and (in)justice across the hemisphere.
Parhizkar’s work has been supported by a Deans Emerging Scholar Research Award and the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration at Yale. She has also been recognized for her “exceptional promise as a teacher” with a 2021-2022 Prize Teaching Fellowship from Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. For her creative writing, she is a recipient of a CantoMundo Fellowship.
With U.S.-based Central American collective Tierra Narrative, Parhizkar has co-curated transnational literatures and works in translation from throughout the Americas for The Poetry Project and FENCE magazine. Most recently, she produced and co-created the Tierra Narrative multimedia film project Que hora es en el reloj del mundo? / What Time is it on the Clock of the World? (2024), commissioned by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the Park Avenue Armory in New York. With TN member Óscar Moisés Díaz, she also co-edited a folio of Salvadoran women writers, all made available in English by translators of Salvadoran heritage, published by FENCE Steaming in 2025. in 2024, Parhizkar co-created and co-chaired the Central American Futurities Conference–– first transnational conference dedicated to Central American thought in the northeastern United States.
Since 2021, Parhizkar has taught virtual critical-creative writing workshops that have been taken by artists, scholars, and writers from around the world. Learn more about her workshop offerings here.
Parhizkar grew up in the Alief neighborhood of Houston, Texas with familial roots in eastern El Salvador and northern Iran.